Tues Day
by Malvolia
Summary: What is there to do when you afraid you are someone's dream, except to ask her if she still thinks she's dreaming? Hatter goes in search of Alice.


Mere hours after Alice left, and his arms are a mass of bruises from all the pinching. He hasn't winked out like an extinguished candle, so far as he knows, but he can't help wondering if maybe dreams go on, somewhere in the back of the mind. Not for everyone, of course, but for an Alice, perhaps, for the only Alice that matters, anyway, anything can happen, and may, and probably does.

That evening, all through the first Mamoreal memorial (Mamoreal, memorial; Mamoreal, memorial; Mamoreal, memorial; magnificent) slaying celebration (an alliteration nearly as good), he dodges quick glances out from under his eyebrows at the Queen, the Hare, the Dormouse, the Cat, the Hare—goodness, twice as many Hares? no, Thackery just moved down for a clean cup—casting his eyes about like fishhooks, trying to catch someone else's, because he'd be able to tell by looking at them, wouldn't he? Whose dream it was?

The premise is flawed, obviously so, in that he's not sure how fellow dream characters look at each other. He's only ever had his own dreams—or dreams within Alice's dream, goodness, what a trick—and he's mad at least by half, so it's all he can do to hang onto his own mind, let alone make the leap to someone else's and see things through their eyes.

So it is that in the darkness of the night following the Frabjous Day, Hatter creeps onto the field of battle with two large teapots. It's nagging at him, this wondering, and the only way to resolve it is to ask, and the only person to ask is Alice. He finds no Jabberwocky blood at all, not even a drop, and he's just going to lift the head of the Jabberwocky and shake it over the teapot when it occurs to him that he finds no Jabberwocky head, either, not nohow, as the Tweedles might say. Contrariwise, when he turns mournfully away from the scene of the slaying, the clouds part and the moon shines down on the White Queen.

"You needed only to ask," she says, and he doesn't know how to answer, how to put this set of circumstances into words because there aren't words, not yet. She smiles affectionately and pulls a bottle of purple liquid from beneath her outer robe, extending it to him. "Don't drink it all in one place."

"Your majesty," he says. "The height of rudeness, coming out to carve up a head that doesn't even belong to me without so much as a word of permission. I do so apologize." He reaches his hand to the bottle, opening his mouth and squeaking as gratitude catches in his throat.

He escorts the Queen back to Mamoreal, or rather she escorts him, pulling him by the elbow every time he nearly walks into a tree because he's holding the bottle at every angle, seeing how the liquid sparkles in the moonlight. But why is he still holding the bottle, unopened like this, he wonders, and goes on wondering (more wondering) until he sees Mallymkun and Thackery on a bench in the palace garden and finds one answer, anyway, that should have been more obvious. You can't disappear without saying goodbye.

* * *

Mallymkun's heart skips an excited beat when Hatter tells them, but Thackery shrugs and interrupts his nibbling at a scone only as long as it takes to mutter, "Just don't be late for tea."

"Going to Overland?" she asks, fit to burst at the thrill of it. "When do we leave?"

"This very night," Hatter says eagerly. "What a grand surprise!"

She rubs her hands together in glee.

A cough from around the corner of the nearby hedge heralds the arrival of the White Rabbit. "It would be inadvisable enough for you to go, Hatter, let alone Mallymkun." The dormouse bristles and the rabbit hurries on. "Speaking from experience," he reminds her. "You've no idea how harrowing it is up there, trying to pretend you're like the others. None of whom, I might add, go about wearing clothes, let alone speaking."

"Alice wears clothes," retorts Mallymkun. "Alice speaks." McTwisp sighs and adds that of course he meant none of the animals. She's a long time sulking over this while the rabbit explains to Hatter that Overland men don't wear eye-shadow as dramatic as his, nor is their hair as unruly, their skin so pale, their eyes quite so large.

"What'll be left when you've done with him?" Mallymkun wants to ask as McTwisp leads Hatter off to the palace, but she doesn't because she's curious, herself. She casts a sidelong glance at Thackery, who has somehow gotten his ear into his mouth and a scone down his sleeve, and sets him to rights. Maybe McTwisp had a point, even if it wasn't the point he'd made. Who knew how many pieces Thackery would end up in if she weren't around. For all Mally's initial hesitation (and Alice's, for that matter), Alice had proved herself capable of taking care of all of Wonderland—surely keeping Hatter out of mischief for a short while wouldn't be too difficult for her.

Would it be a short while?

When McTwisp and Hatter return, Thackery and Mallymkun fall off the bench laughing. Their mad friend has been shorn like a sheep. He keeps reaching the ends of his fingers, now divested of their bandages, to touch the close-cropped edges of hair that still show a hint of rebellious curl. His suit has been replaced with one of startling white, which only makes his hair and naked eyes pop out like flowers growing in a snowbank. The only thing that looks right about the poor man is his hat, which he is clutching tightly. From the furtive glares he shoots at the Rabbit, Mallymkun divines that the hat was to have been replaced as well.

"Is he meant to look like a ghost, Nivens?" Mallymkun asks the Rabbit when she gets her breath back, and the Rabbit only nods pointedly back towards the palace. "Ah," she says, taking in the glimmering white walls and wondering just what it is the White Queen has against primary colors. "Right, then."

"Oh, my ears and whiskers," says McTwisp. "I've forgotten the map. Stay right here," he commands, "until I get back." He hops off to the palace again.

Hatter twiddles his fingers in a wave until the palace doors close behind him, then plunges his hand into his pocket and draws out the bottle.

"Well," he says brightly. "I'm off."

Mallymkun doesn't ask why he isn't waiting for McTwisp, because she knows she wouldn't be waiting, either. McTwisp, with his love of maps and instructions and rules, is a good hand at errands, but he doesn't understand about adventures. She reaches up a hand, and the Hatter solemnly shakes it.

"Will she be older?" comes the question, out the second she thought of it. "Her time might go faster than ours. Speaking of Time, you're hardly on speaking terms, you know. Will _you_ get older out there?"

"I don't know," he says. "It's a leap, Mally, a mad leap."

"But you'll be back?" she asks forlornly, which comes to the heart of the matter, and he smiles and pats her on the head.

"Before you know it." He uncorks the bottle. "Certain you don't want to come?" he asks.

"Alice isn't the only one with things she has to do," she says, snapping more than she means to. She pulls Thackery up off the ground, and the two of them wave goodbye as the Hatter dissolves before their eyes.

"TARRANT!" bellows the White Rabbit. Mallymkun jumps onto Thackery's shoulder and grabs his ear. She doesn't have to tell him to run like the wind—he's not much for putting up with McTwisp in a temper, either. They're out of sight before he reaches the bench.

* * *

Hatter sways dangerously as he materializes, unprepared for the tossing deck of a ship at sea, and the harshness of broad daylight. A hand catches him by the elbow, and he catches it back, blinking against the brightness of the sun on the waves and the sails and her eyes.

"Those things you had to do?" he begins with no preamble, because he's been practicing these lines so no tangents will get into them. "The notion popped into my head that we might do them together." He bites his tongue to avoid adding, "you and I, that is to say me and you, the two of us, us both, the pair" or anything else extraneous, and notices that she is staring at him in stark amazement, looking rather as though she may laugh.

"You don't remember me, do you?" he asks, crestfallen, and drops his eyes to the varnished boards below his feet. "Forgotten, that quickly. Thought you dreamed me up, and so did I, so do I still, sometimes, but if I'm here and you're there, does that mean I'm really there, in your mind, I mean, or are you here, and everywhere I am, which I think perhaps may be because it is, you see, how it seems..."

She takes his face in her hands and he draws a ragged, gaspy breath and looks up.

"Hatter," she says, and he smiles back, because she's smiling and because he knows what she's going to say next, "I'd know you anywhere."

"You're exactly the proper size today," he says exuberantly, and leans forward and kisses her on the tip of her nose.

"And you," she says, taking his arm with a companionable squeeze, "are awfully late for tea."

"Then there _is_ tea in Overland," he sighs contentedly.

"If it's tea you're looking for," she replies, "you've come to the right place. We are on our way to China, and the country produces great quantities of it."

"I was looking for you," he says. "Finding you on your way to a country of tea is a happy accident."

"Or destiny," she says in drily mysterious tones.

It doesn't much matter to him which it is, as long as it _is_, which it is, which is wonderful. He pinches himself again, just to be sure, but he isn't dreaming, nohow.

"A cup of tea with you," he says, "is just what I've been wanting most. But out of curiosity... What day is it?"

"Tuesday."

"'Tues Day,'" he repeats, stretching it out like taffy. "What does it mean?"

"It doesn't mean anything."

His eyebrows furrow in confusion and concern. "A day with no meaning," he mumbles. He fishes his watch out of his pocket and opens it carefully, one eye closed against what he might see, but it is still running, and it does say "Tuesday." Which of course is odd because he's had several Griblings, and even more than one Frabjous, but never once a Tues.

"What I mean is that here we don't have an Oraculum—we find the meaning in our days as we live them."

"What a mad notion," he replies, and smiles again. "You must be half mad, after all." A thought strikes him. "Meaning...madness... So you were thinking of things beginning with 'M' as well, then," he adds brightly, and then it hits him that that is just the sort of thing that would happen in a dream, the mind bouncing around from one idea to the next, forming connections. It was like being mad, dreaming. So he'd gathered from all his sane friends, at any rate, not that he had many completely sane acquaintances, come to think of it, except for Bayard and his family. Sanity, he thinks, is for the dogs, and the giggle that follows is quenched by the memory (another "M" word) that his question has in all likelihood just been answered.

He is a figment. A dream.

Unless it is just the sort of thing that happens with friends, too, and it could be, couldn't it, that they are friends, he and Alice, have been friends for positively ages, even if Time won't admit it?

"The meaning of a day," she says, "is always easier to find after a cup of tea."

It could be (and likewise, probably was), that Tues Day was the kind of day friends liked better than all the other days, except maybe the days that weren't Tues Days at all, and anyway you couldn't go far wrong with any day that had tea in it, and if he is a dream, at least he is one that keeps going, and a dream that keeps going is like a friend, too.

"That's logic," he answers contentedly, and dreams probably don't understand logic, either, so that's one more point in favor of his reality.

Eventually he will have to return to Underland, because he promised, and he keeps promises just as much as he keeps going, but for now, for Tues Day and perhaps a few unwritten days beyond it...

Overland has wonderful tea.


End file.
